A Fresh Start : Vietnamese Volunteers Help Youths at Juvenile Hall Celebrate Lunar New Year

Her name is Xuan, meaning “spring,” and this is the fourth winter she has spent apart from her family since she ran away from home in Santa Ana.

But it is the first lunar new year the 16-year-old will spend locked inside the Orange County Juvenile Hall.

In the dreary surroundings of the detention center, the Tet holiday, which arrives Thursday, would have been dismal indeed if Vietnamese volunteers had not visited Wednesday to help Xuan and other Vietnamese youths celebrate what is for them the most important day of the year.

The volunteers “make me cry,” said Xuan, who has been at Juvenile Hall since July and expects to stay there five more months, her sentence for a crime she would only describe as “serious.”

“I feel homesick, and if they didn’t bring Tet here, I’d be really sad,” she said.

Traditionally, Tet is a holiday that brings families together, Thanksgiving and Christmas rolled into one. Like other cultures’ New Year celebrations, it is also seen as a time to start afresh, a chance to forget the past year and seek new beginnings.

At Juvenile Hall, 11 boys in blue uniforms and two girls in maroon and gray uniforms gathered about 7:15 p.m. for a Catholic Mass in Vietnamese to celebrate the holiday. Afterward, the volunteers passed out plates of red sticky rice with sausage, sweetened fruit candy and red envelopes of lucky money--actually foil-wrapped chocolate coins.

Xuan is one of nearly 40 Vietnamese youths at the facility, who comprise about 10% of the total population, said Tony Carrasco, a chaplain for the Catholic Detention Ministry at Juvenile Hall. The teens’ full names are not being published because of their ages.

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Vietnamese Catholic volunteers come to the facility on the first Wednesday of each month to hold Mass and conduct Bible study for the youths. Some also come back individually for one-on-one counseling with the youths.

During Wednesday night’s Mass, the Rev. Thanh Van Nguyen encouraged the inmates to use the new year as a second chance to turn away from a life of crime. He recounted how he had looked forward to Tet as a child because everything was new.

“I got new clothes, new shoes, a new haircut, all to welcome the new year,” Nguyen told the teens. “My parents told me not to cry on Tet or I’d cry all the time throughout the year.”

The young listeners laughed, and he continued: “They also said that if I behaved on the first day then the rest of the year would be good for me.”

The promise prompted a boy to ask, kiddingly: “What if we’re in jail at the start of the new year? Will we be in jail for the rest of the year?” And there was more laughter.

“No, if you are good in jail on New Year’s Day then you’ll get to leave here, because you’ve changed,” Nguyen answered with a smile.

Turning serious, the priest added: “I’m sure on New Year’s Day, a family day in our culture, your parents will miss you very much. I ask you to do what you can to hurry home to them.”

After he ended the Mass, the youngsters wrote New Year’s wishes for their parents.

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Chien, a boy of 14 whose name means “battle,” wrote: “Wish my family a happy new year. Sorry I can’t be there with you.”

He said he has been at Juvenile Hall for a month and will stay three months more after being convicted on car theft charges. This is his sixth time in Juvenile Hall, he said.

Nguyen’s sermon might sound good, Chien said, “but it’s unrealistic. It ain’t easy to do. But it’s nice they came here to be with us because (otherwise) we can’t celebrate in here.”

Later, a 16-year-old boy sang a Vietnamese song to the accompaniment of a guitarist. In the ballad, a son tells his mother he won’t be coming home this spring.

The boy impressed the volunteers with his knowledge of the song’s lyrics. Asked how he had learned the ballad, he grinned and answered: “Karaoke.”

At 8:30 p.m., the teens were required to return to their cells in single file, just as they had arrived. But this time they were holding plates full of Vietnamese treats.

The sight affected volunteer Hong Nguyen, 21, who came to the Mass inside the jail for the first time Wednesday.

“I wish there had been more time to talk to them,” said Hong Nguyen, who is a secretary with the Garden Grove Police Department. “They’re really torn between the world we want them to live in and the world that they actually live in.”